Many standards have failed for the web. Anybody remember VRML? Actually I like it that we have not a broad big big standard which includes MathML which only ~0,1% of people care about in the browser. MathML can stand on its own (encapsulated with JS like PDFs in Firefox) or you can abandon it entirely. You are free to choose. It's the best way for everybody.
MathML is a failed web standard
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Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#12MathJax looks excellent.
MathJax is slow and doesn't work in RSS.
I'd love to let people read my blog entirely in their RSS reader. But unfortunately most of my posts won't render there.
Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#13One big advantage of MathML is the ability to copy-paste from webpages directly into software like Mathematica. I don't think there is currently any alternative to MathML in that respect. The author argues (rightly) about styling and presentation of MathML, but doesn't propose an alternative to this copy-paste problem. May be TeX, when you're using MathJax at least ?
The author knows this problems... he is dealing with that for years because he is one of the MathJax programmer or even inventor?! The question is if you want to maintain a huge standard in the browser (which is not the case for many browsers today) only for copy&pasting (maybe this can also be solved in another way with JS clipboard magic).
Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#14Blargh. It annoys me that MathML was even a thing. We've already had a perfectly-fine and widely-used markup language for mathematical formulae; it's called TeX. Ideally, I'd prefer that HTML5 include a tag, or something similar, that takes TeX as input and produces formatted output. A side benefit would mean that every browser, and every system, in the world would have TeX installed! At least MathJax can take TeX as…
There is no "math subset" of TeX. You would have to define it. Or include a full TeX engine including macro capabilities into web browsers.
Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#15MathJax looks excellent.
MathJax is very flexible and its output is certainly high-quality. However, it is difficult to configure and package in my experience, and it's pretty slow. We used it for a few years at Khan Academy before building KaTeX ( https://khan.github.io/KaTeX/ ) which is around 50x faster to render in our experience, not even counting download size. We ran an A/B test for MathJax vs. KaTeX on the Khan Academy site and peopl…
thanks for pointing out KaTex. Did not know it before
Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#16[deleted]
Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#17Blargh. It annoys me that MathML was even a thing. We've already had a perfectly-fine and widely-used markup language for mathematical formulae; it's called TeX. Ideally, I'd prefer that HTML5 include a tag, or something similar, that takes TeX as input and produces formatted output. A side benefit would mean that every browser, and every system, in the world would have TeX installed! At least MathJax can take TeX as…
you cannot compute TeX... there are two versions of MathML: presentation MathML (which is like TeX) which shows only the look. And there is content MathML which describes semantic. So you are comparing only one side of the medal with TeX ;) See here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Content_MathML
But I agree TeX is easier to write and read if you only care about the look and feel.
Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#18Blargh. It annoys me that MathML was even a thing. We've already had a perfectly-fine and widely-used markup language for mathematical formulae; it's called TeX. Ideally, I'd prefer that HTML5 include a tag, or something similar, that takes TeX as input and produces formatted output. A side benefit would mean that every browser, and every system, in the world would have TeX installed! At least MathJax can take TeX as…
TeX is analogous to Presentation MathML but doesn't solve the accessibility concerns because the semantic intent of the TeX source isn't always clear. (How do you read a \phantom{}? Or how can you know that "\left( 7 \atop 3 \right)" should be read as "7 choose 3"?)
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Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#19MathJax looks excellent.
MathJax is slow and doesn't work in RSS. I'd love to let people read my blog entirely in their RSS reader. But unfortunately most of my posts won't render there.
I assume most RSS readers don't support CSS (and webfonts) fully? If they did you could use KaTeX's server-rendering feature to embed the actual HTML, but otherwise images are probably your best bet.
Re: MathML is a failed web standard
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
MathJax is slow and doesn't work in RSS. I'd love to let people read my blog entirely in their RSS reader. But unfortunately most of my posts won't render there.
I assume most RSS readers don't support CSS (and webfonts) fully? If they did you could use KaTeX's server-rendering feature to embed the actual HTML, but otherwise images are probably your best bet.
I'll have to check out KaTeX's server rendering. Might be exactly what I'm looking for.